This book opens with an account of the meticulous dismantling of a car in public over five days and closes with the narrative of the reconstruction of a river boat for new collective uses. Two vehicles with an enormous symbolic load of what we commonly call civilisation frame the research collected in this publication, carried out between 2020 and 2023, which deals with critical practices in the Anthropocene. The contents address architectural projects, artistic processes and research into the loss of the centrality of the human factor in the configuration of the environment based on critical visions of this cultural, material and political process that marks, like no other, the contemporary condition globally. The title alludes to a famous essay by the ultra-conservative cultural theorist Hans Sedlmayr called Verlust der Mitte (Loss of the Centre ) from 1948. This mythical attack on modernity lamented the loss of the centrality of the Anthropos in the industrial world, visible in the new decentred structures of modern art. What the book seeks to show is that the lost centre that Sedlmayr longed for never really existed. The environment, capital and extractive economies are woven into narratives that architecture, the humanities and artistic practices that affect space can and must critically unravel.

The volume is edited by Fernando Quesada and features contributions by Mike Brookes, Rosa Casado, Uriel Fogué, Óscar Cornago, Lidia Barona Segura, Fernando Quesada López, María Jerez, María Teresa Muñoz, Víctor Ballesteros Mateo, María Auxiliadora Gálvez, Silvia Zayas, Victoria Pérez Royo, Ana González Torremocha, Diana Delgado-Ureña, Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo and Susana Velasco.

Our chapter, Sentient Ecologies, includes reflections on ‘Death, eroticism and darkness’, ‘Skin’, ‘Dust’, ‘Interspecies’ and ‘Towards the wild’.